


you don't have to stay forever, just promise you'll come back someday

by CallMeBombshell



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:45:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallMeBombshell/pseuds/CallMeBombshell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You’ve got a hell of a gap in your security, Stark.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“Actually,” Tony says, smirking slightly, “I think you’ll find it’s not so much a gap as a very precisely-shaped back door which requires a particular set of biometric readings and a very specific brain-activity pattern, and is only valid when attempting entry at one single window in the study.”</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In which the Avengers get a late-night visit from an unexpected figure from Tony's past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you don't have to stay forever, just promise you'll come back someday

**Author's Note:**

  * For [defcontwo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/gifts).



> This is for Sam, because _months_ ago I told her I would write her Kings fic about Jack Benjamin and I still haven't managed to finish it, so in the meantime I'm writing her all manner of Avengers fic because she is awesome and amazing and y'all should go read her stuff because it's brilliant.
> 
> So this fic exists because I had this idea, right, where Tony knew all about Steve because he snuck into his dad's study a lot and looked at all his old photos and schematics and propaganda posters and whatnot in the middle of the night because Howard would never let him see them otherwise. And so he knows all about Captain America and Steve Rogers, but he also knows all about his best friend, Bucky, and the Howling Commandos, and Peggy Carter.
> 
> This... er, isn't actually that idea at all, really, but it's an idea that came from that, where Tony ends up being a lot more entwined with his dad's past than people might think, and in some interesting ways.

JARVIS alerts Tony to the trouble only about a minute before the rest of the team is automatically alerted to the break-in by the house security systems. But Tony’s in the basement and the break-in’s in the study on the second floor, the same floor that the Avengers’ main rooms are, so by the time Tony gets up there, his advance notice hasn’t done him any good. 

The rest of the team is clustered by the locked door to the study; Steve’s got his shield and Thor’s got his hammer, and Tony thinks he sees the glint of a knife in Natasha’s hand as she lurks in the shadows against the wall next to the door. Clint is unarmed, but Tony’s seen him when he’s bored, and his ingenuity at turning anything at all into a weapon in very short order means that he’s always within arm’s reach of something dangerous; Bruce, of course, is never unarmed.

They look like they’re debating whether or not to try smashing the door open when Tony walks up. 

“You can’t pick the lock,” Clint’s saying, waving a hand at it with a vague expression of disgust on his face. “Believe me, I tried. And then Natasha tried. And she _failed_.” Natasha huffs, looking disgruntled.

“Look, he clearly doesn’t want anyone in there,” Steve sighs, sounding like it’s something he’s had to say many times before. “It’s his house, he’s allowed to keep stuff to himself. You don’t have to go poking around into everything.”

And that’s something to think about, really: how many times have people tried to get into this room? Tony should know better, by now, than to put up what is essentially a giant, fuck-off “Do Not Enter” sign in a house full of spies and generally nosy busybodies and expect them to actually respect it.

“Mjolnir’s might could break through this wood,” Thor offers helpfully, “but knowing our Tony, I doubt that he would rely on such frail defenses to protect whatever secrets lie in that chamber. There are doubtless other fortifications.”

There aren’t, actually, any other fortifications to the room besides the walls themselves which are six inches of solid hardwood and another inch or so of drywall and panelling on the inside; the door itself is build the same way. The end result is a very sturdy, very secure, very sound-proofed room, exactly what Howard Stark had had in mind when he designed it.

Tony shakes away those thoughts; any attention paid to the details of the house and Tony starts getting that itch to redesign, to make improvements, to tinker, and then he gets lost drawing up blueprints in his head for three hours and comes back having dismantled the stairs or something, and now is not the time for that kind of inattention. He focuses his attention back on his teammates, who are still arguing about breaking down the door.

“Besides,” Steve is saying, “We don’t even know what’s in there, and JARVIS won’t tell us anything.”

Tony smiles a bit at that; JARVIS has always been on his side, even if he chooses to remain snarky and critical all the while.

“JARVIS,” he calls, smirking when the rest of the team whirls around to face him, having apparently not heard him arrive. “You said _interesting security breach_ , mind telling me exactly what that means?”

“Sir, it would appear that it is not so much a breach,” the AI responds quickly, “but a deactivation of certain safeties and an activation of an alert of such, triggered by a very specific set of circumstances.” JARVIS sounds almost baffled, and there’s definitely something of a confused tone to his voice. 

“I am unable,” he continues, sounding slightly offended, “to provide any further information, including the nature of these specific circumstances, or the state of the room, or indeed the nature of the security event itself. Both the security protocols themselves and the alert about their status is being run from a separate server which is not connected to my network,” and oh, yeah, there’s no missing the snippy, insulted tone the AI’s using now.

Tony’s grinning, he realises suddenly, can feel the tug at his cheeks; he must look sort of deranged, he thinks, given the look Steve’s giving him, skeptical and slightly concerned.

“Great,” Tony says still grinning, “fantastic, awesome, step aside everyone.” 

The others part, reluctantly, to let him step closer. Tony reaches out and puts his hand to a blank stretch of wall beside the door. A numeric pad and a palm scanner shimmer into view, outlined by glowing blue against the smooth texture of the wall. Tony places his hand against the scanner and keys in the code. He’s not even particularly careful to try to hide it; after all, it’s pointless, since Clint’s got a nearly eidetic memory and Natasha can read a man’s writing just by watching his hand move. 

The keypad beeps twice, then fades out of sight again as the door unlocks with a series of muffled clicks. Still grinning, Tony reaches out and swings the door wide, strolling into the room beyond. The lights come on automatically, soft yellow light smoothing over the bookcases along the left wall, the armchair and the side table in front of them, the large, mahogany desk across the room with more shelves behind it, these ones filled with filing boxes and thick, bound ledgers.

And across from them, on the far side of the room, there is a man, leaning casually next to the far left window, casement swung wide open and the screen carefully cut away so the man could slip through. He’s leaning against the frame with his arms folded across his chest, one hip angled out and his ankles crossed, posture loose like he’s just been standing there, waiting for them to finally open the door; his face is largely in shadow, but there’s enough light to make out the twist of a smirk.

The others have clearly followed behind Tony, their footsteps muffled on the thick carpeting. There’s a tiny gasp from someone, and Tony turns to look at his teammates, trying to judge their reactions, because this is a stupidly important moment, even if they don’t quite understand it yet, and, well, Tony is sort of praying that no one ruins this for him. And while none of them has said anything, neither have they obviously gone for their weapons, so Tony considers that a good sign that things are going well so far.

They’re ranged at his back in a sort of line, and Tony suspects that under other circumstances, it’d probably paint a pretty intimidating picture, the six of them standing like some sort of ridiculous police lineup of frighteningly competent, highly destructive not-quite-soldiers. As it is, they’re all clad more-or-less in lounging clothes, all t-shirts and loose pants (Clint’s even in a hoodie, which makes him look more like a college student than a world-class assassin), which rather takes away from the overall effect, despite the array of weapons at hand. 

Bruce is peering at the man in surprise, as though he had been expecting a very different kind of visitor. Thor, next to him, is eyeing the man suspiciously, clearly not happy with the current level of deception and lack of obvious things to swing his hammer at.

Clint’s watching him with the sort of super-intense focus he usually reserves for when he’s on missions, or for people who he’d really like to shoot things at but can’t for whatever reason. Beside him, Natasha’s expression is downright _furious_ , eyes glaring daggers as sharp as the one she’s twirling threateningly between her fingers; Tony’s brain very carefully resolves to put that one aside for now and come back to puzzling it out later when he’s not in quite as much danger of being gutted, either by accident or design.

And Steve, what the hell, Steve is staring at the man with an expression of absolute shock. He looks like he’s been punched in the gut and left staring, wide-eyed and unable to breathe. Tony frowns for a moment, watching him, but Steve seems to notice because he shakes himself, visibly, and takes a deep breath, schooling his face into something more normal, although Tony can still see the way his pulse is jumping in his throat. 

Tony turns back to the man at the window.

“Well,” he says, breaking the silence, because the others are still silent and Steve looks like he can’t even begin to manage speech at the moment. “I guess I can stop putting flowers on your grave, then.”

“But they’re always so pretty,” the man says after a moment, following Tony’s lead and ignoring the way everyone else turns to him, gaping. Tony’s slightly manic grin fades a little, becoming something softer, more real.

“You’ve got a hell of a gap in your security, Stark.”

“Actually,” Tony says, smirking slightly, “I think you’ll find it’s not so much a gap as a very precisely-shaped back door which requires a particular set of biometric readings and a very specific brain-activity pattern, and is only valid when attempting entry at one single window in the study.”

“That’s... really, stupidly ridiculous, Stark.” The stranger arches an eyebrow, looking like he’s not sure whether to be impressed or skeptical.

“Yeah, well. I figured you’d be back, and I was counting on you trying the same thing you tried last time.” Tony shrugs. “The biometrics and the brain scan and all that are just to make sure it’s actually you and not the other guy coming in to try and kill me with that lovely, fancy arm of yours.”

The man’s eyebrows inch up towards his hairline, expression going disbelieving and ignoring Bruce’s quiet mutter of, “...the other guy?”

“Ignoring the arm comment for the moment,” the man says, holding up a hand. “Do I even want to know how you managed to get your hands on my brain patterns?”

Tony shrugs again. “You really don’t want to know how I got the other guy’s brain scans,” Tony says, deadly serious for a split second before he continues. 

“Easy enough getting yours, though, Dad had the brain scan tech back when he was turning Rogers into the world’s best action figure. Basically just an MRI, I just improved on it after the first time you dropped in out of nowhere, you know, hooked it up to a computer and ran a bunch of programs to tell you two apart. No big deal, really.”

“No big deal.” The man’s eyebrow rises another incredulous fraction of an inch.

Tony shrugs. “I was bored, seemed like something worth doing.”

The man laughs, short and sudden and cut off, and grins, shaking his head. “You really did think I’d come back, didn’t you?”

There are a lot of things, Tony thinks, that he could say to that, _I was hoping_ and _You'd be the first_ and _You were my first friend._

He still remembers how unafraid he was, sneaking into his father’s study late one night, fourteen years old and still enamoured of the old war mementos his father kept locked away in his desk. He remembers the way he’d frozen in place upon seeing the man’s shape bent over and rifling through the desk drawers, thinking it was his father; he remembers the relief when he realised it wasn’t, and the overwhelming curiosity when the man looked up and his face was familiar, a face Tony knew from the photos in the bottom drawer of the desk, the man with dark hair and dark eyes, a rifle slung across one shoulder and his arm around a taller, broader man in red, white, and blue; in the photograph the two are in sepia, but little fourteen year old Tony always knew what colours it should be.

“It’s not the first time it’s happened,” Tony points out, now, looking at the man by the window with something like fondness inhis eyes; the man inclines his head in agreement.

“True enough.”

Tony thinks back again, remembering the open window and the way something cold and brittle in his chest had seemed to ease when he heard the man’s footsteps as they crossed the room to lean over Tony where he sat in his father’s chair, twenty years old and ruler of an empire, still trying to figure out how to fill his father’s shoes. He remembers the looking up and seeing concern in those dark eyes, remembers vague words of encouragement; thinks, _You came back the second time, even though you knew there wasn’t anyone left to find._

“What can I say,” Tony says, shrugging. “You were supposed to be long dead the first time you showed up. Guess I figured if that hadn’t stopped you, wasn’t much else that would.”

The man laughs again. “Guess you’re right.”

They stand there for a moment just watching each other, and then Tony steps forward and reaches an arm out, pulling the other man into a loose, one-armed hug.

“Hello, James.”

“Hello, Tony. It’s been a while.”

**Author's Note:**

> It should probably be noted that I wrote this all at once at something like 3am, right as my sleeping pills were kicking in, so if there are any problems with grammar or spelling or, you know, total insanity and complete lack of sense, that would be why. 
> 
> This is probably not the end of this story, or, really the beginning, even. I'd like to play around with this a lot more and write more both before and after this story, if only because I like the idea and I want to have fun with it.


End file.
